New Blog Article Notification for Members?

This is an interesting problem! On the one hand you have users that don't want to get notifications to forums/replies, on the other hand you have found another way but have to opt them in.

My first instinct would be to ask users to mute any threads not of interest to them or not subscribe to the forums, but if you are just posting articles then they are likely better suited as blogs anyhow.

Now that they are blogs and people have to opt-in, they aren't. Could you email them and ask them to opt-in, as a one-time shot? They click the button and then off they go! If they just won't and you're OK forcing the opt-in (careful of user feedback on this), we could handle that via a script. That would be run on the existing set of users and it would opt them in. That doesn't help with future users unless a script is run again.

Our default is for users to opt-in. Why? We've had several instances where when we had the default as opt-out, we were given feedback that it was too spammy for people that didn't choose to be subscribed to content. We also chose to go this route for GDPR to make life easier for our customers adhering to that policy. I'll ask the team about creating a UI for this so customers can choose whether to have a blog as opt-in or opt-out and leave it up to them to handle any concerns from there.

If I am not understanding the specific flow, just holler and I'll jump on a call with you to chat about the best approach! If any of my other smarter colleagues have better ideas, they'll chime in here as well!

Your "why we did this" logic makes sense, but I feel like if you opt-in as a member to a group you are opting-in to all communication that comes from said group. If anything, I would have liked to be able opt the members out of the forum reply notifications. They liked getting the "Here's a new question" e-mails, but despised the replies.

For this specific group, we do an Open Office Hour every two weeks to talk about community management best practices. Understandably, not all 200+ group owners can attend, so it's important we still get the meeting notes and presentation out to them. This area was also to serve as a place for me to send out important announcements, updates, or requests (outages, launch, upgrades, etc.)

I like the script idea. This is the same group we have a group owner script for already... so any way to tie it to that?

Jillian Bejtlich said:

I feel like if you opt-in as a member to a group you are opting-in to all communication that comes from said group

This was our previous thinking as well, but again we had a significant amount of... feedback... that it was not the right way to think about this. We were told that users should only subscribe to the content they want to subscribe to, not be forced to be subscribed to it all and then have to go opt-out. I'm not saying you are wrong at all, literally every community is unique, we just polled customers back in the day and this was the response we received, so we adhered to it. 

Jillian Bejtlich said:

They liked getting the "Here's a new question" e-mails, but despised the replies.

That's actually kind of funny if that's alright to say! We do provide the mute thread option for users, but I guess if you despise any reply ever, then that would become a nuisance to have to do every time. Side note, people wanting to reply to replies is a big reason threaded replies/comments came to be in the online world.

In this case, you were right to move them to Blogs because if people never wanted to reply to each other, then no point in using a forum per se, just make it a "one-way" conversation and move along.

Jillian Bejtlich said:

Understandably, not all 200+ group owners can attend, so it's important we still get the meeting notes and presentation out to them.

This is the part you're doing as blogs, right? Are they commenting on those blogs or is it pretty quiet? I'm asking because if no comments are needed then, could potentially use wikis for these as well for some structure to them. You still run into the problem of users actually having to subscribe to it. I feel like a Youtuber now saying Like and Subscribe!

Jillian Bejtlich said:

I like the script idea. This is the same group we have a group owner script for already... so any way to tie it to that?

Ah yes, the automation we built for adding owners to a role, right? I'll hit up some of our folks to see if another automation could be built for this purpose. I wouldn't want to tie it to the original automation so that it can be used broadly if there are others that only want the subscription functionality.

Jillian Bejtlich said:

I feel like if you opt-in as a member to a group you are opting-in to all communication that comes from said group

This was our previous thinking as well, but again we had a significant amount of... feedback... that it was not the right way to think about this. We were told that users should only subscribe to the content they want to subscribe to, not be forced to be subscribed to it all and then have to go opt-out. I'm not saying you are wrong at all, literally every community is unique, we just polled customers back in the day and this was the response we received, so we adhered to it. 

Jillian Bejtlich said:

They liked getting the "Here's a new question" e-mails, but despised the replies.

That's actually kind of funny if that's alright to say! We do provide the mute thread option for users, but I guess if you despise any reply ever, then that would become a nuisance to have to do every time. Side note, people wanting to reply to replies is a big reason threaded replies/comments came to be in the online world.

In this case, you were right to move them to Blogs because if people never wanted to reply to each other, then no point in using a forum per se, just make it a "one-way" conversation and move along.

Jillian Bejtlich said:

Understandably, not all 200+ group owners can attend, so it's important we still get the meeting notes and presentation out to them.

This is the part you're doing as blogs, right? Are they commenting on those blogs or is it pretty quiet? I'm asking because if no comments are needed then, could potentially use wikis for these as well for some structure to them. You still run into the problem of users actually having to subscribe to it. I feel like a Youtuber now saying Like and Subscribe!

Jillian Bejtlich said:

I like the script idea. This is the same group we have a group owner script for already... so any way to tie it to that?

Ah yes, the automation we built for adding owners to a role, right? I'll hit up some of our folks to see if another automation could be built for this purpose. I wouldn't want to tie it to the original automation so that it can be used broadly if there are others that only want the subscription functionality.

If there is anything I have learned over a lifetime of using forums and more than decade of working with platforms, despite the best intentions of the community vendor, community manager, and community users - there will always be 300 ways of doing things and a million opinions. Ha! This specific group alone can't even agree on the simplest of things, so I'm not losing too much sleep over it.

I ended up sticking with the blogs, posted directions on how to opt-in, and then sent out an e-mail anyways about two articles and three upcoming workshops I'm scheduling. It all worked out.

And don't worry about the automation. Even if we got this working perfectly, another group will want something totally opposite. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.

Thanks!